Best Practices or Ideas for Modeling Assets: Water Magnetic Flow Meters

[PeterKing]

Hello UN Community,

As we further refine and edit our water Utility Network and production features (Wells, Chemical Injectors etc.), I am looking for other users' input on how they modeled Magnetic Flow Meters in their production systems.

Inline, Associations, Objects?

Any feedback or idea is appreciated!

[tikola]

This is not UN community but water distribution community. In Esri Water Data Management solution there is a separate feature class for this kind of measuring devices.  We use them with multiple clients and typically there is always some scada integration always relaed. So that we get a daily value of measured water and then it is used in water balance calculations. This image show the location in Esri data management  - in local language of course 😀

But in generally storing that device geometry in system makes sense but even more makes sense to get the numbers from device. 

Basically our approach is to take flow meter value - sold water values and combine them on certain regions to build water balance analysis. How much there was water pumped/flowing in system and how much we managet to sold it out. The interest is obiviously to figure out how much water got lost.

[RobertKrisher · Accepted solution]

Is there a reason why you wouldn't draw the feature in-line? Even if you were to use junction-junction associations or non-spatial objects to represent the meter itself, you'd still need to have it be associated with a network feature that participates in a subnetwork in order to include it in tracing and analysis.

By making it a feature (as opposed to a non-spatial object) it makes it much easier for you to visualize any measurements associated with the meter by either joining the latest reading to the layer or using a popup (or relate) to show all the readings associated with the meter.

[gis_KIWI4]

I must agree with @RobertKrisher.
Having meters in-line is the best approach. It's easier for the editors and is easier to visually identify.
Using associations can work but if you needed to visualize the connections then it's an additional step. Non-spatial objects are going to be tricky but if you were to go down that route there is now support in the trace widget for using non-spatial objects.

No wrong way but what works best for your business case 🙂